Could there be two John Pistoles?

Could John Pistole have an identical twin who helps him run the Transportation Security Administration — a John Pistole and a John Pistole, maybe?

Here’s why…

John Pistole appeared over the weekend on CNN’s State of the Union to say that TSA’s highly invasive airport security screening procedures are here to stay. Those would be the ones that give travelers the choice of having their physical accouterments inspected either by sight or by hand — but always by complete strangers.

“What I’m doing is going back and looking at: Are there less invasive ways of doing the same type of screening?” he said.

But at the same time, John Pistole was in front of the cameras again, this time on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, where he defended full-body scans as safe and patdowns as effective at preventing people from boarding airliners with bombs.

“In the final analysis,” John Pistole said, “reasonable people can disagree … as to privacy and security. But everybody wants to make sure that everybody else on that flight you’re on has been properly screened, just as they want to make sure you and I have been properly screened.”

Confused? You shouldn’t be. The explanation is simple.

John Pistole is under intense pressure from the public, members of Congress and others to modify modes of security screening that violate the American sense of personal modesty.

Meanwhile, John Pistole is trying to protect those same rudely awakened Americans from knuckleheads who would gladly undergo personal mortification in exchange for the chance to blow themselves limb from limb, along with as many other people as possible.

In other words, italics aside, there’s only one John Pistole and he’s trying to find away to satisfy America’s need for unadulterated personal space while protecting America’s personal safety from people who might be disposed to hide explosives in their underwear.

He might wish he were two people. That can be no enviable task for one guy.

Is it realistic for John Pistole assume that you can keep a voting public in the dark about potential invasions of their privacy, and that terrorists can’t easily test the system? Is it realistic for John Pistole to assume the integrity and sound judgment of TSA screeners who have barely any education?

They are graphically explicit:
http://www.liveleak.com/view?i=972_12622 83908

The images can be saved:
http://content.usatoday.com/communities/ ondeadline/post/2010/11/tech-site-publis hes-100-of-35000-naked-body-scans-from-f la-court/1

The integrity of TSA screeners is not to be trusted:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424 052748704658204575611031585381708.html?m od=googlenews_wsj
http://info-wars.org/2010/11/12/tsa-desk top-image-makes-joke-of-cavity-searching -children/

I’m too old to be squeamish about someone seeing or touching my body. But it only seems worth it if it makes me safer, and already we know the terrorists know how to get through this system. What’s the alternative? How about just limiting these extra screening measures to truly suspicious people, and not letting people on watch lists fly? TSA had the Christmas bomber’s name. These screening methods probably would not have caught him, since a low percentage of people go through them. This was not a failure of one-size-fits-all screening methods but of intelligence.